Scroll is an old word for a relatively new gesture. For centuries, it referred to a roll of parchment or paper. Today, it describes the movement we use to navigate a screen. The object fell out of use, yet the word remains.
It is a curious thing. When the graphical user interface began to spread, the screen was imagined as a desktop. There were windows, folders, documents. Web pages arrived soon afterwards. The metaphor seemed natural: each screen was a sheet of paper, a space with clear boundaries where content began and ended. For a while, that image was enough. You simply moved from one page to the next.
Something changed when content stopped fitting within that frame. Vertical movement, which at first was merely a way of navigating a page that was longer than usual, eventually became the dominant way of moving through the internet. Without anyone explicitly deciding it, scrolling ceased to be an operation performed within the page and took the place once occupied by the page itself.
There is something strange about this movement. Digital experience presents itself as a continuous flow, without separate units, extending with each movement of the finger. Perhaps that is why a word that seemed to belong definitively to the past ended up at the centre of contemporary technological vocabulary.
It is worth pausing for a moment over the page, rather than the book. The book is the object we hold, buy and lend, but the page is the unit that organises what is inside. It divides a text into chapters, groups ideas into sections and makes it possible to build an index in which every subject has a number and a fixed location. A note can be placed at the foot of the page without interrupting the main body. An argument can remain in a separate chapter, waiting for the reader to reach it. None of this is a minor detail of printing. It is a way of thinking that became so habitual that we stopped noticing it.
Marshall McLuhan called it the Gutenberg Galaxy. Before printing, every copy of a text depended on a different hand, and that hand could skip lines, change the order or leave a chapter incomplete. Printing fixed all of that. Once a book had been set in movable type, every copy came out identical to the one before it, with the same pagination, the same index and the same margins. Thousands of different readers, in different cities, ended up thinking through the same fixed structure. The page ceased to be a choice made by each copyist and became a mould repeated without variation. For centuries, that mould invited us to divide things up, to separate one idea from another.
The habit of separating and ordering did not begin with printing. It is much older: every word is already a way of placing the world inside a box. But the page gave that tendency a new scale, and with nineteenth-century positivism it reached an extreme: species, types, categories within categories, everything in its proper place. We came to believe that these classifications did not invent an order but discovered one. In Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller tells the story of the taxonomist David Starr Jordan, who devoted his life to classifying fish, convinced that a natural order was waiting to be labelled. Evolutionary biology eventually showed that “fish” does not describe a coherent group: a salmon is more closely related to a cow than to a shark. The category was not the world describing itself. Something similar happened with the page: the impression that every subject had a clear boundary and a fixed location was not a property of the world, but a property of the page projected outwards.
That certainty began to give way.
Now it is worth looking at the scroll, though not the medieval scroll: by then, the book with pages had already been establishing its dominance in Europe for centuries. This is the scroll as it was used in the ancient world, before the codex had displaced it almost completely by the fourth or fifth century. The ancient scroll could contain columns, titles and annotations. What it did not have was a sequence of numbered pages: the text ran across a continuous surface that had to be unrolled and rolled up by hand, without the possibility of opening it immediately at any given point or keeping two parts visible at once. Historians who have studied the transition from scroll to codex insist that it was more than a change of format: it also changed the way a text was searched, quoted and remembered. The difference is not that the scroll had no order. It organised meaning without depending on the page as its basic unit.
The feed does not reproduce that ancient scroll. Under completely different technical conditions, it recovers some of its features: continuity, movement and the absence of a stable page as a point of reference.
Let us return, then, to scrolling, no longer as an etymological curiosity but as the contemporary gesture of our digital existence. When we open a social network, we do not see a database; we see a flow. Post after post, without visible numbering, without an index telling us how many remain or an ending announcing that it is over. Each post appears in the same space as the one before it, competes for the same attention and is subjected to the same gesture before giving way to the next. Lev Manovich pointed to something similar before the feed as we know it existed: many of the cultural objects produced through software have no beginning or end. They are collections in which each element carries the same weight as any other, without the hierarchy once imposed by a narrative or an index.
Walter Ong had already considered something like this long before the internet existed. Ong studied what changes when a culture moves from speech to writing and noticed something simple: writing makes it possible to go back. An argument remains fixed in an exact location; it can be reviewed, quoted and found again. The spoken word has no such fixed location: it lives in the moment in which it is uttered, and whatever is not repeated is lost. Something similar, though not identical, happens when we scroll through a feed: technically, we can move back up, but there is no page number and no reliable way to find exactly what we saw yesterday, in the same place and in the same order. What is missing is not the possibility of going back. It is a stable point of reference. In this precise sense, although everything happens on a screen full of text, the experience is closer to a spoken conversation than to a written page.
But the feed does not only alter the way text is organised. It also concentrates images that once came from separate spheres. Schedules have not disappeared. Neither have sections: sports, celebrity news, cartoons. What happened was something else. The number of images available at any time of day grew so much that these categories dissolved into a larger flow, one that no longer distinguishes between one schedule or section and another. Infinite scroll did not invent this saturation, but it ensures that the cascade of images never has to stop. Jean-Louis Comolli, a critic and filmmaker who approached the problem through cinema, spoke of a frenzy of the visible: the multiplication of devices that bring the world ever closer to our gaze until they saturate it. The only thing left for the spectator to do is to become critical: to stop looking at what has already been arranged to be looked at and begin to look at how it is arranged.
From there, a concrete possibility emerges: to take an activity experienced privately, alone, and bring it into a collective space, in order to look at it from the outside rather than simply perform it. This is what Collective Scroll proposes, a format developed by Mudmap that takes scrolling off the phone and projects it into a shared space. In each edition, we choose a particular corner of the internet and move through it collectively by way of its images, videos, texts and comments. In the most recent session, around seventy people followed that flow together. Afterwards, during an open conversation, we tried to think together about what we had seen and what relationships, memories or experiences those images had produced. Something that normally happens alone and at great speed became a shared form of reading and conversation.
Collective Scroll does not only seek to make a private gesture collective. It also proposes that we consider what kind of sensibility this gesture is producing: how we experience images when they cease to appear within stable pages and categories and become part of a continuous flow; how that form reorganises our attention and, with it, our perception of the world. Taking scrolling off the personal screen and unrolling it together, without yet knowing where it ends, allows us to observe that transformation as it happens and to discover that the newest word on the internet had been carrying within it, all this time, a very ancient way of encountering texts and images.